We got a good chuckle over the weekend from The Associated Press article about John Yancey, the upstate New York NIMBY who objects to the stand of seven windmills on his neighbor's land: "He hates the sight and he hates the sound. He says they disrupt his sleep, invade his house, his consciousness. He can't stand the gigantic flickering shadows the blades cast at certain points in the day."

Basically, Mr. Yancey, who otherwise considers himself quite green, hates the windmills for the same reasons everyone else hates windmills they can see or hear. Unfortunately, his neighbor also is his father, who needed the lease income ($6,000 per turbine per year) to keep the family farm going.

We were struck most by two sentences in the AP dispatch:

1) "Turbines have their place, Yancey says, just not where people live." OK, but in America, you can't put them in the ocean, where the wind blows but no one lives, because it ruins the sweeping vistas enjoyed by the Kennedys and other blue noses. And you can't build them atop ridges, where the wind blows and no one lives, because it likewise spoils the view. And you can't put them in the middle of nowhere, where the wind blows and no one lives, because it would ruin "America's pristine wilderness."

So for windmills, "their place" is no place.

2) The Maple Ridge wind-power project in Mr. Yancey's town "produces enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes." Most articles on wind power include such boilerplate information, but rarely put the number in context: Despite tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies for research, development and marketing, wind power still is two to three times more expensive than carbon-fired electricity.

It's why, despite all the hype and the pipe dreams, wind turbines still produce less than 1 percent of the nation's electricity and wind will not be a power player until fossil fuels, and NIMBYs, are banished from this land.